On Narrative Continuity, Fiction, Metafiction And Games No-One Plays.

I should save this for Blaugust, really, but who has the patience for that? And anyway, I already have twenty-five posts about EverQuest to write before August. I really should get on that sometime soon.

What we have here is an object lesson on why there's never an optimum time to write a a post and why you might just as well go ahead and publish whenever you're done. The future is always going to roll you over, whatever you do.

On Saturday I put up a lengthy post, telling the tale of how I climbed a mountain and how good it felt to have done it all on my own, with no-one telling me I should. Okay, maybe that last part was subtext but it was in there, somewhere.

Two days before that, I posted about a new narrative event that had just been added to the game, saying how well-written, what fun it was and expressing satisfaction that such quality content had been added to the game so quickly. Alright, more subtext, maybe. But heavily implied. 

The day before that I wrote something about how there were loads of cats in the game and how I'd done a quest involving one of them and rescued another from the top of a tree. I think that one was subtext-free but maybe there was some subconscious subtext. Can't ever rule it out.

Almost immediately after I published the most recent of those posts I was back playing Wuthering Waves again. When am I not, these days? I was in the city, looking for something to do next, when I spotted a quest marker on the map close by.

It took me to the rear of the theater, where a girl was hanging around looking like she was at a bit of a loss. I went over and asked her what was up, as you do if you're the lead character in a TV show about some wandering do-gooder who breezes into town and fixes everyone's problems, once a week on a Friday at seven in the evening, which, let's face it, is basically the elevator pitch for the entire RPG genre. 

She told me her elder sister had joined the army and gone off to the front lines but before she went, she'd left a kind of treasure hunt for her younger sister to follow. The younger sister, Shixia, was some kind of prodigy, who'd been admitted to a prestigious academy but had trouble keeping up with the intellectual pace there, so she had some stuff of her own going on. Also she was worried about her sister, as you would be, what with the war and all.

Naturally, having only just met and nothing in common, we ended up doing the whole thing together. It turned out to be not so much of a treasure hunt, more like some kind of sororial bonding exercise crossed with a motivational mental workout. And the means by which all of this was going to be achieved? Climbing a mountain!

Actually, climbing two mountains, one of which was the exact same mountain I'd just climbed all on my own just a few hours earlier. So much for doing it on my own initiative.

At the start, I didn't realize what was happening because the first part of the quest-line involved the other mountain, the one I didn't already climb. It turns out the two are next to each other. They look over the city, one giant peak split in two. I had noticed the landmark - you can hardly miss it - but at that point I hadn't yet connected it to my own mountain-climbing exploits. 

The girl and I worked our way up the first mountain, largely by way of various paths, although with some free-climbing up sheer cliff faces along the way. There were some puzzles to solve, a couple of easy fights and a surprising amount of cooking. It was good fun and the views were beautiful.

When we'd gotten to the top of one mountain, of course we had to do the other. The treasure hunt was over but it seemed the elder sister had once climbed to the top of the Western mountain, in the rain, just before dawn, so we had to do the same in the name of sisterly solidarity or something.

It seems Wuthering Waves has quite a lot of quests and events that only happen at specific times of day or night. I really did have to wait until just before in-game dawn the next morning, when I got a message from Shixia saying she was ready and oh look, how lucky, it's even raining!

Long story short, we climbed all the way to the top of the same mountain I'd already climbed, only we went the sensible way, following the paths and the remains of that dilapidated wooden walkway I mentioned, which turned out to be more passable than I'd thought, especially with the aid of a couple of grapple-cannons we found along the way.

It was another very strong, involving and enjoyable quest and if I'd waited a day I could have incorporated it into my post about mountaineering. Wouldn't that have tied everything up neatly?

Well, no, not really. The same day I was doing all of that, another, new narrative event was added to the game, another Companion Story, this one featuring what absolutely appears to be the first non-human character we've seen, Lingyang.

Lingyang is a lion-dancer, which is a job, not a race or class or species. Maybe a calling. A vocation.

He has a long tail and lion-like ears. It's possible these are part of his costume but if so he wears his costume all the time. I'm fairly sure his animalistic attributes are natural, if only because at one point in the story someone makes a point about how dangerous he is when his tail starts to wave from side to side, which is not something I think anyone would say about someone wearing a fake tail.

If he is some kind of hybrid or separate species, however, there's no explanation for it even in passing. He seems to be treated just the same as anyone else, possibly because he seems to be the nicest person in the world. Seriously, he could win prizes for it. 

As with Yinlin's Companion Story, I hadn't planned on jumping straight into this one but Wuthering Waves is exceptionally good at lead-ins. There's some excellent in-character use of in-game technology and some effective meta-fictional prompting that make it very easy to find yourself on a quest before you've even stopped to think about whether you want to go questing right now.

It helps a lot that the stories are so well-constructed. Once you're going you don't want to stop. Again, in this one there's mystery, plenty of detail and enough background to make you care about the characters and the stakes. Plus a big helping of excitement and adventure as you figure it all out. I certainly wouldn't claim any of it was original but it's highly entertaining.

The tl:dr is that a bunch of bad guys are running a scam that's causing issues with the food supplies to the city and also incidentally scaring a girl who was just about to join an adventuring association. The scam involves a monster with a really silly name that makes it hard to take seriously as a threat although everyone in the game seems to manage it, somehow. 

The girl's brother, with whom she's had a huge argument, goes off to try and eliminate the monster or the gang or both so as to get back in his sister's good books, which inevitably leads to her being scared something bad has happened to him (She's not wrong.) and eventually to Lingyang and the player character setting off to sort it all out and set it all right.

Well, we did all of that and it was great fun and took a couple of hours of quality time to finish, with some 2D platforming and a few big fights along the way. If I'd have waited a couple of days, I could have portmanteaued the two Companion quests together for a much stronger post. That would have wrapped everything up nicely.

Ehhh... would it, though?

Much of the story takes place a long way out of the city, in the middle of a region completely unexplored on my map. The big surprise was that, although we were teleported to the final instance, I was allowed to exit the cave normally and find my own way back.

I spent a long time exploring the new area, which was fascinating, colorful and very weird. I was hoping to open some teleport towers for future adventures but I couldn't find a single one. I don't know if that's because there's some kind of level or story lock on them appearing or if I was just unlucky not to bump into any as I wandered around in circles. 

Eventually I ended up in the sea, swimming up against one of those invisible barriers that say Go No Further, so I ported back to Zinzhou, but before then, while I was wandering around the countryside, I got a phone-call from Xiaoju, the quite possibly crazy cat-lady from Wednesday's post. 

She said she'd she was having another cat-related problem and since I was so good at dealing with those, maybe I'd like to come over and sort this one out for her. Once you get a reputation it's so hard to shift perceptions, isn't it?

Why fight it? As soon as I'd finished my exploring I got right on the cat thing. Catching the noisy stray and getting it back to Xiaoju was simple enough. I delivered the somewhat unwilling feline and Xiaoju said she'd find it a good home but first she asked me what we should call it. I went with Xixi. (Hey, I could have called it Insomniac! That was one of the options.) 

Xiaoju went off with the animal and I went back to the city thinking if only I'd waited I could have tied all these storylines up with a nice, neat bow and delivered them in a single post. Except if I'd done that, next time I logged in, some other dangling thread would have caught in the ever-turning gears of the game's unusually complex narrative engine and I'd be right back where I started.

It's a little too early to make declarative statements about the extent and reach of Wuthering Waves' intertextuality but there does seem to be a little more in the way of connectivity and resonance than I'd expect. I like it. 

It does make it harder to work out when to start posting about stuff that happens to me in the game. If I leave it more than a day, I can barely even remember what order things happened. I had to revise this post three times after I looked at the screenshots I'd taken because I had it all in the wrong order. If I post right away, though, I risk missing out on a whole raft of consequences and implications.

Still, I'll take the hit. It's not like anyone else is going to pick me up on any narrative anachronisms, is it? That's one advantage of writing about a game no-one else is playing. No-one can say you're doing it wrong.

That should be my Blogging Advice for Blaugust 2024. Pick a game no-one else plays and then no-one can call you on it if it turns out you don't know what you're talking about. 

Of course, you won't have any readers but hey, omelettes, eggs! Amirite?

You know I am.

The Séance Society And The Solitary Path

I started another post this morning but before I'd finished the opening paragaph I realized what I really wanted to do was play Wuthering Waves, so that's what I did. And now I'm going to write about it.

As usual, I wasn't timing my session but from memory I played for around an hour and a half, took a break, then played for maybe another hour. For the whole of that time I was doing one, continuous narrative sequence, Solitary Path, the "Companion Story" for the new Resonator, Yinlin.

Well, she's new to me, anyway. She's the focus of a new Event, When Thunder Pours, and by "event" I mean Cash Shop promotion. Based on that and the fact that the only video of Yinlin's adventure didn't pop up on YouTube until a few hours ago, I'm guessing both the character and the event arrived in the game at the same time.

I knew about the event before I started playing today but since it appeared to be nothing but a Gacha promo I had no intent to pay it any mind. That all changed in a matter of seconds after I logged in, when, the moment I appeared in Jinzhou, I got a call from Chixia, asking me if I could look into some missing persons reports for her.

Naturally I agreed because what else am I there for if not to do everyone else's job for them? Okay, that's a little unfair. Unlike most games I've played, characters in Wuthering Waves do genuinely seem to have real jobs with fixed hours and actual responsibilities they'll get into trouble for shirking. 

They even give broadly convincing reasons why it makes sense for me to run errands for them. As Chixia points out, Rover does keep running around all over the place anyway. She's in and out of the city all the time. And as we've established, she does have that Access All Areas pass the magistrate gave her...

What makes less sense and indeed completely undermines the whole conceit that the NPCs have prior commitments and full lives, is the way I, as the player, can summon any of the NPCs I've added to my team at any point, not just in combat but even while I'm just wandering around or goofing off. That's why lots of the screenshots you'll be seeing here may have someone other than the character I started with posing for a selfie. I'm sometimes not myself at all.

There's a crucial moment in the Solitary Path storyline when it becomes particularly hard to swallow this paradox, even with the most liberal sprinkling of story-teller's salt. I'll elaborate in a moment but just on the off-chance someone reading this might be playing the game (Unlikely, I know.) I'll just mention there will be extensive spoilers from here on. 

The Cliff Notes version of the plot is that it turns out the missing people have all lost someone to illness, accident or misadventure. A nebulous organization called the Séance Society has contacted them all with an offer of a way to see their loved ones again. After much investigation it transpires that someone called the Dollmaker has been supplying androids, known as "Puppets", that can emulate the dead, something they manage only by means of memories siphoned from the living.

Unfortunately, there's a side-effect. Prolonged exposure to the Puppets can lead to a violent, manic breakdown known as "Overclocking". It affects any human who spends too much time close to a puppet, although it doesn't affect everyone equally. Worse, the Dollmaker seems to be in cahoots with the underground rebel faction, Fractsidus, which wants to use his skills and his puppets for even more nefarious purposes.

After much running around, a lot of talking, quite a bit of fighting and several apparent changes of allegiance by half the cast, Rover ends up fighting her way through the Dollmaker's factory complex, ostensibly as the prisoner of his lieutenant, Yinling, but actually as Yinling's covert partner. 

Before Rover and Yinling team up, though, while Rover still thinks Yinling is one of the bad guys (Which she kind of is.) Rover manages to send a coded message to Chixia revealing the factory's location, which is why the red-haired Junior Patroller is outside the heavily booby-trapped and defended complex with a squadron of Huangdong's paramilitary police force. 

Except at the same time she's also inside it, with me. She's one of my deployable team of Resonators. The fights were getting pretty brutal so I had to call on everyone to see us through to the denouement. I did try not to bring Chixia into play, for the sake of immersion, but on the final boss, an Overlord Class mob almost ten levels higher than me, I really had no choice.

It was a chaotic fight but I'd intentionally charged and saved all my big attacks in the expectation the whole thing would end with a boss fight. Having all four of the team dump their Ultmates on the boss was what swung it for us. Without Chixia, we might not have pulled it off. 

For all practical reasons it was worth breaking immersion to win that battle. Still, it did feel weird when the fight ended and second Chixia broke through the doors and ran in to handcuff the defeated Dollmaker and drag him off to jail.

The aforementioned paradox inherent in the structure aside, I thought the self-contained story was pretty darn good. It would make a very decent story arc in an anime TV series. It certainly had no more logical inconsistencies or internal contradictions than some I've seen. 

The dialog was solid throughout, the plot was twisty and intriguing and the voice acting was convincing. The themes felt remarkably relevant, with some examination of the ethics and morality of AI and a touch of philosophy concerning existential identity and the eternal. I do like it when someone asks me to think.

All things considered, I was impressed. Also satisfied. The whole thing lasted about as long as the narrative section of a Guild Wars 2 Living Story chapter but the story was much better and the fights a lot less annoying.

I wanted to make it clear how much I enjoyed it before starting to nit-pick some of the detail. The issues with characters being in two places at once is inherent to the gameplay but most of my other concerns revolve around sloppy editing and inadequate Q.A.

As I mentioned yesterday, the voice work is produced in London. That may explain why the various voice actors can't seem to agree on how to pronounce some of the Chinese names. For example, there's a girl/Puppet called YuanYuan, whose father fully articulates both the "Y"s, saying it just as it looks on the page. Yinling calls her something that sounds more like "WanWan", which actually sounds more convincing, only then, a little later, she also begins to stress those leading "Y"s, losing the "W" sound altogether. 

It made me wonder if someone asked her to change her pronounciation or whether she reacted to what her colleague was doing. It also makes me ask why, since the whole thing has been translated into English anyway, they don't also give the NPCs western names.

Either way, it's something that ought to have been caught and cleared up in the edit, as should the occasional variations between what the voice actors are saying and the text that's on screen. It would also be nice if the game could remember whether Rover is supposed to be male or female. I realise it didn't actually say the appearance I chose was one or the other but I don't think the way some NPCs use "him"  to refer to my character while others use "her" is intended as a statement on gender fluidity. I think it's just more bad editing.

In general, I did get the impression the translation for the new story was very slightly less polished than before. Only very slightly, though. It was still orders of magnitude better than most imported titles I've played. On the other hand, I felt some of the voice acting was better, possibly - as others have pointed out in discussions I've read - because British voice actors are likely to turn in better performances if they're not asked to put on American accents. 

I did feel there was considerable chemistry between my character and Yinlin, which has something to do with the voice acting but more to do with the writers and the artists. This doesn't appear to be one of those games where you can romance NPCs and this particular story doesn't offer much in the way of leeway to react in different ways, so anything in the way of flirting has either to come from the script, the art direction or wishful thinking on the part of the player.

I don't think it was me this time. I'm pretty sure Yinlin was flirting with Rover and I'm damn sure the art director was telegraphing their attraction, which looked quite mutual on screen. I submit this screenshot as evidence. Judge for yourself.

Characterisation is definitely one of Wuthering Waves strengths. It tends to be, in these kinds of games, where everything revolves around building a roster. Noah's Heart had lots of very strong characters too, largely because they stole borrowed them all from history and literature, but unfortunately the translations weren't good enough to make most of them feel like more than curiosities and ciphers.

Here, they feel a lot more rounded and convincing. They're all familiar types and tropes but that's true of much popular fiction. Characters and story are easily strong enough to hold my interest. My main concern is whether that standard will be maintained.

I remember all too well how strong some of the opening content in Noah's Heart was. I wrote a whole post about one of the segments of the main storyline because it was just stunningly well done. A few months down the line, though, everything seemed much more rushed. By the end of the first year, what little new content we got was so badly translated I literally couldn't understand some of it at all.

I'd like to hope that Wuthering Waves is going to be a lot more successful than Noah's Heart and therefore won't slide into the same downward spiral but I do recall that Noah's Heart claimed a huge number of pre-registrations and was briefly illuminated in a flare of supposed success at launch. It didn't last.

I do wonder, too, what lifespan these Gacha RPGs are intended to have. They look fantastically expensive to produce and therefore to maintain. Perhaps they aren't meant to go on and on like MMOs. And maybe that's a good thing. Genshin Impact has been running for nearly four years now. Does it really need to carry on for another decade?

I think it's best to enjoy these things while the shine is still on them and not to expect that luster to last. If it does, all well and good. If not, there's always another game. Because there always is another game.

For now, though, Wuthering Waves is a lot of fun. I'm going to stick with it until it's not. I've had worse plans.

Social Climbing

So much has happened in Nightingale since I last posted about what I've been doing there, I hardly know where to begin. I suppose I really ought to try to keep to a topic and make some coherent points about the game but really I just want to go "I did this! And then I did that! It was awesome!", like a ten-year old kid telling you about a trip to the adventure park.

Which is pretty much what Nightingale is, come to think of it: a trip to the adventure park. There's a lot of climbing up things and jumping off, for a start. It took me a while to get the feel of both of them, but once I got comfortable with the Climbing Picks and the Umbrella, there was no stopping me. 

They're both slightly more awkward to use than similar options in other games but they work wonderfully when you get the hang of them. They both also have the enormous benefit of being dual use items. Triple in the case of the Umbrella.

The picks make pretty good weapons, which is a big help when you pull yourself over the lip of a cliff and suddenly find yourself staring up at a bear. The Umbrella is a glider but it also keeps the rain off, very important in a game with a deleterious "Wet" condition, and also the sun, which can be even more dangerous in the desert, where you get "Hot" in very short order if you step out of the shade.

Speaking of the desert, I've been spending a lot of time there lately and boy is it harsh!  It's one of the most deserty deserts I've seen in a game, all flat, barren sand, blazing sun and nothing much moving anywhere. I find it quite mesmeric.

The picks are absolutely vital in the desert, something I would not have predicted. The storyline has you making a portal to a Desert Herbarium Realm in search of one Nellie Bly, who supposedly can help you on your quest to get back home to Nightingale. But first you have to find her.

It's a Tier 2 realm, meaning you'll probably want to have upgraded all of your gear to Refined quality, although if you've upgraded the stuff you got from Twitch drops, that probably still has the edge. That campaign has been extended, by the way, and if you already got the drops once, you can get them again. I did. I'm going to give them to Dora.

I made Refined versions of most of the rest of my gear but it was a faff (Cf the post linked above.) and I was trying to save on mats, so I left out a couple of things I thought I wouldn't need, like the Sickle and the picks. As it happens, even if I 'd wanted to replace my Simple Climbing Picks, I wouldn't have been able to. I hadn't noticed then, but I didn't have the recipe for the Refined ones. Unlike most of the others, it didn't come with the upgraded crafting station.

Worse, I was trying to keep my bags as clear as possible so I could fill them up with loot in the new Realm, so I didn't even bring my old picks along. That turned out to be a major error of judgment.

Since Nightingale uses procedural generation to create a unique version of each Realm when you crank the handle on the portal, I can't say for sure whether Nellie Bly is always to be found hiding away on a completely inaccessible plateau, surrounded on all sides by sheer, eighty meter cliffs, but that's where she was in my Realm. 

I knew where to look because quest NPCs are marked on the map, albeit in the vaguest fashion possible. I could see her marker but I couldn't figure out how to get to it. It looked like it was up on top of this gigantic pile of rocks but it could equally have been in a cavern hidden somewhere inside or even a cave beneath. 

I spent a good hour trekking all the way around the giant mesa, looking for a way up, in or through; a road, a track, a path, some crumbling sandstone steps - anything. There was nothing. Nothing but blank rock.

It looked like I was going to have to climb the damn thing. I contemplated the idea of going back and getting my Simple Picks or, better yet, making some Refined Picks, which would presumably make it easier, somehow. Luckily, I didn't immediately map back to Abeyance Realm home because while I was still wandering about the sands, I ran into an Essence Trader, who just happened to be selling the recipe to make the Refined Picks.

That confused me. Didn't I have them already? It tells you in the sales window if you've already got something and greys it out so you can't waste your Essences. The Refined Picks weren't greyed out, which is how I discovered I didn't have the recipe. 

In retrospect, I wonder if the whole point of not giving you the recipe for the Refined Picks up front is to clue you in to the fact that you're going to have to climb the cliffs to find Nellie. That would mean she's up there in all Realms. Or else I'm reading too much into it, which is always a safe bet.

Anyway, that's where my Nellie was and I did indeed have to buy the recipe, portal back home, scrape up the mats, make all the subcombines, then make the picks and come back.

Boy, it was some climb! As I mentioned, Nightingale is one of those games with multiple buffs that all stack. You need a lot of stamina to climb or you will fall and break your leg. Breaking limbs is a thing in the game. A very annoying thing. 

You might even get really unlucky and die, if you fall really far. Done that. Didn't like it much. Don't recommend it.

Luckily, you can buff up your stamina in all kinds of ways. I ate a bunch of different meats and berries and almost doubled mine before I began the ascent. It was enough, although only just. 

Once I'd found her, Nellie had plenty to say. Not out loud, because so far Puck is the only character with a speaking part. Everyone else communicates in writing. I won't give too much away but suffice it to say Nellie does not have the answers you're looking for...

...but she knows someone who might. Isn't that always the way with these things? And don't they all have just one little thing they want you to do for them before they'll tell you where to go next? Actually, you'll be lucky if it's just the one.

The next stop on the story train is Victor. I won't tell you his last name. Maybe you can guess. One of Nightingale's more corny design choices is bundling in as many familiar 19th century personalities as they've been able to glean from their battered copy of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia. They don't make any differentiation between actual people and fictional characters, either. 

I have an exceptionally high tolerance for whimsy but even I find it a bit much when someone tells me the device they're working with was designed by Nikola Tesla and Marie Curie, working in tandem. Victor, naturally, turns out to be exactly who you think he's going to be, unless of course you thought he might be Victor von Doom, which wouldn't have been that much of a stretch, given some of the other people who turn up.

Naturally, Victor doesn't live in the same Realm as Nellie. I mean, why would he? Sure, it would be convenient for anyone trying to find him but if you had the power to spin up private realities all your very own, wouldn't you go live in one, too?

At least he doesn't live on top of a cliff. No, he lives on top of a tower. Nice little set-up, actually. Two rooms and a balcony. I'd take it as a holiday let, especially with all that glorious sunshine because, yes, it's another Desert Realm, the wrinkle this time being that it's a Desert Astrolabe Realm, not a Herbarium.

I had to go home and make the cards first, before I could go there, of course. And since I hadn't finished with the Realms attached to my two existing Portals, I had to make a new Portal, too. That's three so far.

The whole thing is starting to remind me of Valheim, where I ended up with more portals than I could keep track of with a map. Fortunately, you can rename Portals in Nightingale, so at least I won't have to put up a whole bunch of hand-made wooden signs this time.

One of those earlier Portals just goes to a Realm I made as an experiment. I was farming that one for T1 Essences but I don't really need those any more, especially with the 500 or so I already have, so I suppose I could let that map go and re-purpose the Portal when I need to find the next link in the chain.

The other one, though, I want to keep. Bass Reeves lives there and I'm kind of in the middle of a deal with him. He's a lawman, tracking down a fugitive. I'd never heard the name before so I didn't think anything of it when I met him, but wouldn't you know, last night I noticed a show on one of the streaming services about the real life Bass Reeves. 

He was"a runaway slave, gunfighter, farmer, scout, tracker, and deputy U.S. Marshal" according to Wikipedia. Even when you don't know who people are in Nightingale, it turns out you're supposed to. I'm going to have to start googling everyone from now on. (Oh, look! Here's Nellie!)

I got sent to find Reeves by Wilhelmina Sasse, who doesn't appear ever to have been anyone other than herself. She's a journalist and she wants to know what Bass is up to. He's told me because I did some stuff to get him to trust me but he swore me to secrecy and now I have to decide whether to keep my word or sell him out to the gutter press for a handful of silver. (Actually, essences, but that doesn't have the same resonance.)

This is one of those inflection points, where you can tell you're playing an Early Access game. For all Nightingale's many merits, there are a lot of those. You can choose to keep Bass's confidence and not tell Wilhelmina what she wants to know, but if you do, there's no way to finish the quest. It just sits there, giving you the fish eye.

I'm leaving it like that in the hope that they eventually patch in an ending for those of us who value honor over personal gain. Or just don't trust the press.

Meanwhile, I'll be busy working on the shopping list of components Nellie wants for her machine. Victor's just the start of it. I'm sure every other bugger I run into will want something, too. Just as well I'm not planning on going anywhere for a while.

Forty-seven hours and counting...

Tarisland First Impressions: Story

I'm having a great time playing Tarisland. I keep forgetting it's a beta. Partly that's because it's pretty slick on the whole but mostly it's because every new MMORPG I've played for as long as I can remember was at least as janky at launch. Seriously, when did anyone ever release one of these things in a state that could reasonably be described as finished, let alone polished?

The game has all the usual progression hooks but for once the thing that's driving me forward is the storyline. It's not great - let's put that out there right away - but it's coherent, I can follow it and I'm enjoying it. The characters are personable, the voice acting is pleasant, the writing is competent. It's generic fantasy but what in this genre isn't?

The main reason the storyworks well for me has very little to do with its quality. It's all about the delivery. The pacing is just about right, for a start. The cut scenes are frequent but short. There haven't been many moments where I've felt I might as well be watching a movie, something that's happened altogether too frequently in some games I've played.

The cut scenes are well-integrated into the action and the gameworld, too. Much of the time I'll be on a quest, folowing a quest marker or a glowing trail to the next location, and when I get there the other characters will just start talking. Other times I have to click on someone to speak to them, as you normally would in a quest. Either feels comfortable in context. The whole thing just trucks along, carrying me with it.

The characters are fairly strongly individuated. It's easy to tell who's speaking by how they express themselves. That applies to the writing, not just the voice acting. Visually, the character animations seem more limited than usual but for the most part they're expressive enough to carry the tone and import of the dialog.

As someone said in general chat, I wasn't expecting the little guy from Game of Thrones.

There's a test I can apply right now to prove or disprove my thesis. In most cases, if you asked me to name the characters in a new MMORPG I'd just played, I almost certainly wouldn't be able to do it. This time, without looking anything up, I can tell you that the elven healer in the story is Jeya, the minotaur warrior is Lorne, the Princess from the big city is Catherine, the elf queen is Eolona (Or something like that), the dwarf acolyte to the master-builder is Orrin (I forget the master's name but he's Sir Something-or-Other) and the current villain I'm fighting is Zelo, who (SPOILER!) was masquerading as a kindly archivist called Sullivan.

That's a lot more information than I normally retain after 24 - 48 hours, trust me! I could also give a fairly comprehensive summary of the plot but don't worry, I'm not going to.

I'd be able to sum the whole thing up even more convicingly if it wasn't for two things, both of which I outlined in some detail on the feedback survey that popped up when I logged out the other evening. Neither of the problems is unique to Tarisland. One is annoyingly common in most imported titles and the other can be found not infrequently in MMORPGs from both East and West.

Why? What's wrong with Catherine? Oh! You mean for this group!

The first, of course, is the translation. Tarisland sits very much at the upper end of the quality scale for translated MMORPGs but sadly that scale is itself so degraded, even being near the top doesn't mean it's acceptable. 

One of these days, when I have nothing better to do, I might log into every translated MMORPG I have access to and rank the translations. I'm not sure which would come out on top - I suspect it might be Blade and Soul - but I'm pretty sure none would get a flawless score. 

(And before anyone mentions Final Fantasy XIV, I believe I looked into that all the way back when A Realm Reborn launched and found that all the dialog and quest text there is written in English in the first place, not translated from the Japanese. The exact method used seems to be a closely-guarded secret (What else? It's Square!) but this reddit thread suggests that my original understanding is probably close.)

He's referred to consistently elsewhere as her brother. I'm hoping it's a translation error...

The issues with the translation in Tarisland are minor compared with the other problem, which is purely technical, not aesthetic, and needs to be fixed: truncated or overlapping speech and text. Together, these nuisances, while they don't by any means render the game unplayable, do detract significantly from the enjoyment I'm otherwise getting from the plot and storyline.

There are three separate issues: firstly, lines of dialog frequently get cut off before the voice actor has finished speaking. I've seen this in many games and it drives me nuts, not least because it seems so unecessary. Surely someone knows how long each of these sound samples runs? Would it kill them to pass that information along to whoever codes the audio playback?

Fortunately, thanks to the subtitles and captions, I can usually read what would have been spoken but sometimes I miss a line and have to figure out what happened, which leaves me playing verbal catch-up for the rest of the scene. It's distracting and breaks immersion.

Thanks, but I think I've got something on, that day.

Arguably more realistic but practically even worse is the way multiple characters speak over and across one another, something that happens in most games with any kind of ambient voiced dialog. 

In Tarisland, someone's taken the trouble to write plenty of quite good background conversation for incidental NPCs standing around the streets and squares of the city. It adds a lot to the flavor of the soundscape as you pass through the city but it's hell to listen to when a story beat plays out next to a couple of children arguing about elves or a street vendor yelling. 

That, you would think, could be avoided by better use of phasing, which the game already employs, or by automatically muting background sound during storyline sequences. The storyline characters also occasionally speak across each other, although that happens more rarely. Again, you'd think they could be coded to speak in sequence, although that might sound a little unnatural, so maybe some of them should just keep their thoughts to themselves.

Introducing Captain Obvious.

Finally and by far most egregiously, something that really needs to be fixed before the game goes live is the tendency for the text of dialog responses offered to the player to cut off after a few words. This didn't start happening until yesterday so either it's a bug I've picked up that applies to my character specifically or it's something that's crept into the storyline mid-flow. I wasn't seeing until I hit the mid-twenties.

It means that I sometimes have to choose between two options, neither of which I can read. My character is saying things but I don't know what they are. I'm hoping it's all just flavor and nothing I say affects the way the storyline develops but even if it does I have to pick something to say or the narrative won't move on at all. 

Despite these annoyances I'm still managing to enjoy the plot. It moves along entertainingly but not exhaustingly. 

You can't fool me. You're no elf. You're Spanish!

There have been a couple of pauses for breath, where Lone, who seems to be taking the lead most of the time, asks me to come back tomorrow or the next day, which is a lore-appropriate way of telling me to get another level or two first. In other games I've played, this kind of level or time gating has proved an irritant but in Tarisland it seems like a natural break, an intermission, the end of a chapter.

It helps that it's only been taking me half an hour or so to go get the extra level or two I need to carry on with the story. There's a lot to do other than slavishly follow the plot and I've appreciated the hint that I should go explore and have fun on my own for a while.

To pick up on a conversation from the comments in a post from a couple of days ago, I can now confirm the characters with the sticky-out ears are indeed elves. To be precise, they're High Elves, the only elven variant to survive the wrath of a dark god who destroyed their home planet eons ago. A different god, late on the scene, was only just in time to save the High Elves by moving them to Tarisland. 

For which we all give thanks.

See? I remembered all of that without looking it up! I must really be following the plot!

Somewhere in the twenties the narrative moves to the Elven homeland, the generically-named Misty Forest, which comes complete with all relevant elven trappings including a world tree big enough to build a city in. Naturally the tree is dying and of course we have to be the ones to do something about it but I won't spoil the plot any further, mostly because that's about as far as I've got.

Like everywhere else I've seen in Tarisland, Misty Forest is gorgeous. I spent a lot of time taking screenshots. The cut scene that tells the history of the elves is also delightfully illustrated. Tarisland is very lovely to look at. 

All together now, children! He's behind you!

Another thing I want to clear up is the "Three Days Earlier" moment in the tutorial that I referred to in my first post abiout the game. I wasn't imagining it. That really is what it said. The whole starting zone with the minotaurs, in which you level up to the high teens, is a flashback. The game catches up with the tutorial in the second zone, where the storyline wraps all the way around to finish with the same fight with the dragon that ended the tutorial. 

It's really well done and I was very impressed. It came as a surprise to me but I don't believe it was supposed to, just as I don't think any of this is really a spoiler because it does tell you it's a flashback - I just didn't believe it at the time.

The drawback of such a strong, clear, linear storyline is that it's going to be compelling once, bearable twice and bloody annoying ever afterwards. If, as I suspect, the only way to level alts in Tarisland is going to be to take them through the storyline, that's going to get old very fast indeed.

By way of hyperspace, apparently.

It's not, however, a problem unique to this game. It's a very retrograde design choice that's become commonplace throughout the genre. Creating multiple starting zones and levelling paths is obviously expensive so most developers don't do it. And as the game matures, no doubt alternate methods of levelling or ways to skip content will appear.

For now, I'm happy to go through the story this one time to see how far I can get before the beta ends. I'm level 27 now. I think there might be 80 levels. I'll be happy if I can get halfway.

Got to leave something in reserve for when the game goes live. It looks odds on I'll be playing then, too, by which time I hope most, if not all of the issues I've highlighted will be no more than a memory.

I Almost Didn't Recognise You With That Beard!

This afternoon, I made it to the first dungeon in the new EverQuest II expansion, Renewal of Ro. That makes it sound as though it was a bit of a trek but in fact the entrance was right there in the harbor. It's one of the first things that catches your eye as soon as you arrive.

I haven't been keeping an exact track of how long I've been playing since the expansion dropped. I know it probably hasn't been as much as other years. There seems to be more pressure on my time than usual right now, which seems odd, given I'm only working a couple of days a week. 

Most of what slack there might have been seems to have been taken up by Beryl and her many daily walks; more than she'd probably choose for herself if she was in charge, to be honest. We really enjoy going out with her, even if the weather has been less than amenable. I'm clocking up three hours a day, more days than not and never less than two.

Dog walking hours, that is, not EQII playing. I'd guess EQII is getting about half that. Even allowing for the difference, progress seems to have been quite sedate, which is in no way a criticism. I'm taking my time to savor the atmosphere. I have yet to step beyond the first zone, although I believe that I have now at least opened the whole map. 

It's behind you!

I made a comment in an earlier post, suggesting the embargo on flying mounts didn't particularly matter due to the relative flatness of the terrain. With more experience, I need to revise that observation. It's true that the desert itself is easy to explore on foot but the expansion so far is unusual in its inclusion of what I can only describe as a number of jumping puzzle elements. 

There's nothing to ressemble the kind of formal set-pieces seen in games like Guild Wars 2 but several quests require you to find some way up cliffs or onto the tops of mesas. EQII has a fully-fledged climbing mechanic that's been much employed since it was introduced back in the game's first expansion, Desert of Flames, but even though we've returned to that same desert seventeen years later, this time around it seems we're expected to clamber and scramble our own way to the top, not follow in the scuffed bootprints of those who climbed before us.

I've been enjoying the challenge. EQII's movement mechanics don't really have the facility for finely tuned jumps but the game does have a couple of advantages othes lack. One is a peculiar, floaty adhesiveness to vertical surfaces that allows you to move forward while sliding along walls and the other is the ability to glide almost weightlessly by use of any item with the spell effect Featherfall, found mostly, if not exclusively, on magical cloaks.

If this was Noah's Heart I'd use my grappling hook.

In that fashion, I've so far been able to reach everything and go everywhere I've been asked. This afternoon I spent an enjoyable twenty miutes figuring out a workable glide path to get to a quest item on top of an otherwise inaccessable rock formation. I imagine some players find it irritating (A few comments in General chat have certainly suggested it.) but I have to say it's working for me. Sure, I'll be glad to get back to flying when the appropriate point in the narrative arrives but for now I'm having fun doing it the old-fashioned way.

Speaking of the narrative, the plot has held together quite well so far, in a slow-build, low-key kind of way. It makes a pleasant change from the end of the world scenarios we usually get. Yes, there are some bigger issues looming in the background that I'm sure we'll get to eventually but for now it's all about bandit attacks and Djinns with mysterious agendas. Standard desert fare and all the better for it.

For example, there's a lengthy sequence involving infiltration into a bandit camp while disgused as..., well, what would you disguise yourself as if you wanted bandits not to notice you? Another bandit, of course.

Who are you and what have you done with the boss?

Normally I have "Hide your illusion form" toggled on at all times because I'm proud to be a ratonga but there's a practical side to be considered, too. If you're not seeing yourself as others see you, sometimes you forget whether you've put your disguise on or not. Well, you do if you have a memory like mine.

Having been set upon by angry bandits one time too often, (Admiteddly, I do stand out rather as a ratonga. Desert bandit clans don't seem to practicethe kind of racial integration - or at least grudging acceptance - that's de rigeur almost everywhere else in Norrath) I flipped the switch so I could see my illusion and I have to say I found it rather fetching. I wouldn't generally go out dressed like that but I think the beard kind of suits me. Not to mention the turban.

The visuals in RoR are generally very pleasing. There's a quest where you have to wander in and out of tents playing the flute. When I "used" the flute, I was surprised to see and hear my character actually playing it. Also, there were musical notes floating in the air - but I think that might have been heatstroke. 

In retrospect, I wish I'd thought of hiding the illusion so I could see if the animation works for a ratonga. That'd be like the Pied Piper in reverse. Sadly, I didn't think of it until after I'd finished the quest and now I don't have the flute any more. I'll have to try and remember, if and when I do it again on my Bruiser.

That's great, Zel! Now we just need to find a good pitch and put down a hat and we'll soon be raking it in!

It's all been very entertaining so far and the difficulty level has been just about right for me. I've run into several more solo Named mobs on my travels and added a notch to my sword for each of them. No particularly good drops so far, although even the common drops are upgrades at this stage. 

I was apprehensive going into the new dungeon, actually an instanced version of the entire zone, now overrun by bandits. The last few expansions have been a bit hit and miss when it comes to solo difficulty in instanced content. By and large it's been fine but there have been occasional difficulty spikes, often right at the start.

I'm pleased to report that the regular mobs in the opening instance are very manageable. They don't take too long to clear and I never felt overwhelmed. The first Boss (Or "Named" as we Norrathians would have it.) posed no problem at all. I took him on without first reading up on tactics and although he had several tricks I was able to power through them all and treat him as a plain tank'n'spank. He didn't drop anything very special either but it's early days. 

I would have gone on to try the next Named but I foolishly clicked on the wrong X when I was trying to close the map and closed the whole game instead. Not the first time I've done that. I really shouldn't play in Windowed mode. It's asking for trouble.

Seeing I was at desktop anyway, I though I'd come here and write this, so here I am. Solo instances persist for three days in EQII and I'm not working until Sunday so I should have plenty of time to get through the whole dungeon before it time-expires. Wish me luck!

Innocence, Experience And Why My Feet Hurt

It's Saturday night, it's close to bedtime, I have work tomorrow and the only post I've done any prep for would take far too long to finish. If it wasn't Blaugust, of course, I wouldn't be posting at all. When I broke my lengthy run of daily posts a while ago it was mostly so I wouldn't have to do this any more - come home from work and spend the rest of the evening blogging instead of relaxing.

Not that I don't find writing blog posts relaxing. I do, most of the time. I also perform better to a deadline so that's not really the problem. Mostly it's just that I do get quite tired after a day's work. It's not like I'm carrying bricks up a ladder all day, granted, but working in a large bookshop can be surprisingly physical, as I often feel the need to explain to fey bibliophiles who gush about how wonderful it must be to spend the working day surrounded by books. Try lifting them off a lorry by the crateful and carrying them up four flights of stairs, then tell me how wonderful it is...

My particular role involves much walking across three floors and five storeys, interspersed with long periods of standing in front of a computer screen. It's hard on the legs and actually worse now I only work two days a week because my feet don't quite have time to get used to it the way they did when I worked full time. Well, nearer to full time than I do now. It's been a very long time since I genuinely worked full time.

Added to that, every day now comes with an average of two hours dog walking. The books say twenty minutes twice a day is sufficient for good canine health but we like to give Beryl a lot more outdoor time than that. On a work day it gets cut to just one long walk in the evening but it's still another hour, hour and a half on top of the seven hours I've done already.

All of which leads me to believe it's best if I only post on work days when I have something I really want to say. And since I work mostly at the weekends and, for reasons I've explained, weekends are the last time anyone should post anything that really matters to them, if ever I do have something important to bring to the attention of the world, or the infinitesimal part of it that reads this blog, I'd be well-advised to save it for Monday, anyway.

All of which goes to show two things: 

1) I really can knock out several hundred words about nothing much at all, without even catching a breath

2) Blaugust makes people do things they wouldn't - and quite possibly shouldn't - normally do.

I didn't want to discuss any of that, though. The real reason for the long introduction is simple. When I sat down half an hour ago, with no clue what I was going to write about, I flipped through my Noah's Heart screenshot folder and an idea came to me immediately.  The problem was, the post that ought to have accompanied the screenshots I wanted to use would have needed a lot more thought and time than I was ready to give it just then.

That's how I came to start riffing on how and why I was too tired to write a long post. Next thing I know I've written six hundred words, which is plenty to give the whole thing the look of a real post, not something cobbled together out of need and desperation.

So, what about those screenshots? What was the post going to be about, anyway? Well, I'll tell you, since you asked.

In part, it was going to be yet another attempt to explain why I keep playing this odd game. I was going try to illustrate the variety of characters and storylines that give the whole experience a woozy, off-kilter feel that I really enjoy.

That in itself wouldn't have taken too long. The offputting part was when I realised both the quests I'd chosen to highlight also exemplified a storytelling trope I find almost pathologically appealing, namely the childlike innocent, whose naive commentary reveals the innate flaws in the supposedly mature worldview of the protagonist and by implication the reader, or in this case the player. Especially when they speak in the third person, using their own name. That really gets to me.

I was going to go all  the way back to the Superboy comics I read as a child, where there were sometimes vignettes featuring not just Superman as a boy, the raison d'etre of the title, but also Superboy as a baby; a baby that could barely talk and yet could, by virtue of his Kryptonian heritage, still foil evildoers, whose greed or malice he could barely comprehend yet could still easily recognize.

From there I would have weaved my way through various anthropomorphic animals to paradigm-shifting moments like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, finally concluding with some brief words about Lost Ollie, the Netflix show I'm currently watching.

As you can imagine, all that would have taken quite some time. Certainly a lot longer than the fifty minutes it's taken me to type this. It's now just before ten in the evening and it's going to take me another fifteen or twenty minutes to add the illustrations to the body of the text, think of a title, put in the tags and finally give the whole thing a final edit before hitting publish.

With that in mind, it's time for me say goodnight. I'm sorry I didn't have time to write the full post but I'm sure everyone can fill in the details for themselves. Or be my guest, take the idea and work it up for a post of your own. 

You do all have blogs, don't you?